"What's missing is the support necessary for large-scale application development."
This is exactly what Google Web Toolkit aims to solve. But its amazingly under-appreciated and I'm still not sure why.. I suspect the learning curve is a put-off to many developers. Or simply b/c it uses Java, that could also be it.
"The only way to fix many of these issues would be to strip away the browser, to strip away JavaScript, to change the nature of HTTP and the related conventions."
Supposedly HTML5 aims to do some of this. W3C is reconsidering this new standard to address some of the inherent problems being described.